Monday, February 29, 2016

Kinder,
Gentler: While
Hillary is running around promising ponies to the blacks in South
Carolina, Bill
Clinton's dismantling of the welfare state is entering its last
lap. Starting appropriately on April Fool's Day at least 20 states
will implement rules that say no single person without dependents or
disabilities will be able to get food stamps for more than three
months out of every three years. Can't find a job, starve. Can't
find a job that will pay enough to put a roof over your head and eat,
live on the street or starve. Best estimate that this will toss at
least half a million people into the gutter, just so a few folks can
gloat over the punishment being handed out to Them, the freeloaders.
Congratulations.

Four
Republican Monkeys:
No to confirmation. No to a vote confirmation. No hearings no
matter who the nominee is. No meetings with the nominee, not even as
a courtesy. They have even
put it in writing. They are so damned adamant that it seems
quite possible that they are trying to convince themselves, not us.

Sowing,
Reaping: For
24 years and counting the Clintons have simultaneously courted Wall
Street, fleeced the American public and managed to pretend be the
enemies of the former and friends of the latter. Bill's big
achievements were crippling the welfare state, ending Glass-Steagall
(thus letting banks gamble with your money) and passing the Commodity
Futures Modernization Act (deregulating derivatives, like the
sliced-and-diced mortgage foolishness) , and passing NAFTA and with
it shipping 9 million US jobs abroad. For which they have been
handsomely rewarded. Bill is worth $80 million, Hillary another $45
million – all from working for the citizens and giving speeches.
Right.

The
Quote: “The
senator [Bernie
Sanders] is upset with
a political and economic system that is often rigged to help the
privileged few at the expense of everyone else, particularly the
least advantaged. He believes that we have a two-tiered society that
increasingly dooms millions of our fellow citizens to lives of
poverty and hopelessness. He thinks many corporations seek and
benefit from corporate welfare while ordinary citizens are denied
opportunities and a level playing field. I agree with him.”
Charles G. Koch

Asked
& Obvious:
When it comes to political discussions, do facts matter? No. The
misinformed, presented with objective facts, become even more
entrenched in their misbegotten delusions.

Secret
Sauce: To
recap: Barak Obama
began his presidency
promising the most transparent and open administration in history and
delivered the most secretive and paranoid. We'll never know what
turned the suave, cosmopolitan and intelligent man with a penchant
for sardonic humor into one of the most secrecy-obsessed mandarins in
our history. But that he is: Whistleblowers? Jail 'em. Emails?
Read 'em. Phone calls? Listen in. Citizens? Track 'em. Muslims?
Drones, of course. Wall Street crooks? Pay the blackmail.

Caste
Cast:If
the 590,000 white men
(who represent 1.2% of
the 25 to 54 year old)who are
institutionalized (jail,
mostly) were counted as unemployed, which they are, the unemployment
rate would be 6.4% not 5.0%. If the 7.7% ob black men of the same
age were counted, the unemployment rate for blacks would be 19%.
Black men are
imprisoned at six times the rate of white men. There
are more young black high school dropouts in prison than have jobs.
Add in local jails,
which are not included in these statistics, and things are worse,
much worse. On in nine black kids has a parent in jail. There are
more young black male high school dropouts are behind bars than have
jobs. One in 13 black adults cannot vote because they have criminal
records. They don't get jobs for the same reason, or if they do they
are minimum wage and short hours. We jail so many blacks that it
skews our social statistics.

Saturday, February 27, 2016

“Logic
clearly dictates that the needs of the manyoutweigh the
needs of the few.”Spock.

Innocent
Bystanders:
It's kind of amusing to watch the GOP reaping what it spent so many
years sowing. Now that Trump is gathering in the racist, xenophobic,
government hating rank and file that's been crushed by the rich who
think they own the party, the national leadership has discovered that
most Republican voters are not really Republicans. Faced with a
Trump triumph, the Old Guard is wondering if the Democrats will save
us. Nope, because the Democrats are bent on self-destruction too,
with Hillary. Barnum was right, no one ever went broke
underestimating the American public. Or its politicians.

Definition: Frau Merkle is now
pushing for ‘market-conforming
democracy’, which is
Eurozone-speak for 'more austerity'.

It's
The Money, Stupid:
“International
terrorism is a strategic foreign-policy tool, which, in almost all
instances, is applied by fundamentalist Sunni Islamists, whose
operations are financed by fundamentalist Sunni royal families of the
Arabic nations. The royals (and their billionaire friends who receive
state contracts from them) in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, and Kuwait,
are the main financial backers of jihadists. Actually, those royal
financial backers are terrorism’s controllers, and the jihadist
fighters are merely their soldiers — soldiers who are well paid by
their controllers, but who fight not only for the pay: they
fight also because they share the same fundamentalist Sunni faith as
their controllers do. Their clerics tell them to obey their royal
masters, and it’s a ‘holy war.’” It's
not ISIS-controlled oil fields we should be bombing.

Academic
Fleedom: Now
that students can tote guns into classrooms, Texas universities have
advised faculty members to “avoid sensitive topics”, wear
bulletproof vests and get adjuncts to teach the rowdier students.

Herd
On The Street:
Last year was the worst year for world trade since the Recent
Disturbance, with the
value of international goods shipments declining 13.8%.
The first two months of this year have
not
been encouraging, either.

Report
To The Commissioner:
“Looking back on
almost 15 years in which the United States has been engaged in
something like permanent war in the Greater Middle East and parts of
Africa, one thing couldn’t be clearer: the planet’s sole
superpower with a military funded and armed like none other and a
“defense” budget larger than the next seven countries combined
(three times as large as number two, China) has managed to accomplish
-- again, quite literally -- absolutely nothing, or less than
nothing.” So why do
we keep droning on?

Footnote:
While making the world safe for America back in 1965/66, the US
helped Indonesian forces kill a million or so civilians. See, you
thought it was a new thing with us, right?

Creative
Destruction:
There’s too much of everything, its far too cheap, and that’s not
good for anyone. It’s hurting everyone. Oil costs almost nothing.
Copper, iron ore, all that stuff – nobody wants it, but they keep
mining the stuff anyway. More surplus. Lower prices. Can't even
sell enough to pay the interest. But nobody has any money so even
though stuff is nearly free we can't buy it. We got so good at
making stuff without humans that the humans can't afford to be
consumers. The only way to save the economy is to crash it. Time to
start over.

Open
Call: US
District Judge Mark Kearney, auditioning to replace Scalia, has ruled
that the First Amendment does not give the public the right to record
their employees as they go about their public functions in pubic.
For example,according to Kearney yo do not have a Constitutional
right to film cops in the execution of their assigned duties.
They're legally invisible.

Friday, February 26, 2016

The
Problem:
The real problem with this country is that our taxes are way too
low, our government budget isn't far enough in deficit, and we treat
the rich and their minions as though they were our betters and
deserve all they can steal.

Point
Of Order:
Coral will not survive into the next century because of the
acidification of the oceans. Nor will any of the countless little
thingys with shells that make up the base of the food pyramid in the
seas. Imagine, no sharks at the beach. Also no shells, no fish, not
much of anything swimming in the sterile ocean. Also no shrimp, no
lobster. Got your attention yet?

Facts
Not In Evidence:
The headline reads: “It's
time to admit that American intervention can't fix Syria”. This
makes the unwarranted assumption that American intervention has
'fixed' anything since
1945.

Children
Without A Country:
Republican Illinois intends to make children into invisible
stateless non-persons by denying them birth certificates if the mommy
won't identify the daddy to the all-seeing state. Maybe the moms
could just put down the names of various Republican legislators. The
public good here was a little vague. If a kid doesn't have a birth
certificate, does he really exist? Surely the little tyke couldn't
qualify for food stamps or
public education.

Cornucopia:
House Republicans are considering legislation that would “return”
much of the federal lands to the states, who would in turn “return”
it to the private sector (for a modest campaign contribution) for
mining and logging without regard for any environmental controls.
It's a race to the bottom, sponsored by the bottom feeders for the
bottom feeders and the public be damned.

Takes
One To Know One: Mitt
Romney, who
famously refused to release
his tax forms while running for president, claims that Trumps refusal
to release his givers us “good
reason to believe that there's a bombshell in Donald Trump's taxes.”
The
suggestion is that his reported income and wealth will not match his
reputed income and worth.

Win/Win:Astronomers
have
solved the mystery of where fast interstellar radio bursts
come from (about 6 billion light years over that-a-way, where two
neutron stars crumple into one another). And in doing so they
'found' about half the missing 'normal' matter in the universe.
Turns out it wasn't missing, just hiding. This does nothing to
account for the dark matter and dark energy that makes up 95% of the
mass of the universe. Gravity shows that it is there (and here and
over there and everywhere) but we haven't the slightest idea what it
is...

Lax
Tax:
Under Ted Cruz's tax proposal, the top 0.1% (average income $10
million) would see their taxes cut by nearly $2 million (1,994,000)
on average. That 43,000 times more than the guys in the lower 20% of
the income scale would get – combined.

Thursday, February 25, 2016

How
Low Will They Go?
Parking your money is even more popular than the little red-haired
girl. So popular that it will cost you to do it, as the return on 1,
3, 5 and 10 year Treasuries is negative. Tracking when the Treasury
yield curve (10Y-2Y premia) goes negative has been a consistent
forecaster of recessions. It is now negative and at
its lowest level since 2007. Not
to worry, JPMorgan says the chances
of a recession this year are only 31%. But then they add that
the odds are 50-50 next year and 2 out of three within three years.

Distinction/Difference:
What is the point of closing Guantanamo's torture chambers if those
being illegally held there are simply disappeared into other Federal
maximum security coffins? The feel-good isn't worth the hypocrisy.

Going,
Going, Goners:
About a third of the world's coral reefs have died and the rest will
probably die off by mid-century. But not to worry, they are just the
nurseries for much of the ocean's fish. Why? As the oceans absorb
CO2, they become more
acidic and absorb increasing amounts of calcium carbonate,
the mineral corals use to build their skeletons. The oceans today are
26% more acidic than they were before we started making the Koch
brothers rich.

An
Observation:“Pessimism among
investors reflects not just the indicators pointing towards
recession. There is a deeper concern that, if or when that recession
comes, policymakers will have very few options for dealing with it.”

Here
Come da Judge:
A federal judge has ordered several of Hillary 'The Candidate'
Clinton's aides to answer questions under oath about The Emails.
This is not a plus in the win column for Ms. Clinton.

Happy
Birthday:
Russia, anxious to elbow the US out of the way, has bestowed 10,000
automatic rifles (for which read Kalashnikovs) and millions of rounds
of ammo upon their once lost but now newfound friends in Afghanistan.
The country's military is starved for equipment because politicians
in Kabul steal most of the billions in aid money the US continues to
pour into that particular bottomless pit.

And
Then There Were None:
The Arizona
Senate has passed a school voucher program that, by 2018, would
allow every student in the state attend a private or parochial school
using tax dollars. The only requirement would be that before making
the decision to flee public schools the student would be required to
attend a public school for at least 100 days – which could be four
months of kindergarten. What could possibly go right with this plan?

Flashback:
In China,
45%
of new debt is being used to pay interest on old debt, much
like using a new credit card to pay off an old one. Don't
try this at home...

The
Rich Boys:
Hemingway was wrong, it's not the money that makes the rich so
different from you and me, it is that they live so much longer. They
have better food, better healthcare, they do not labor and they live
in safer neighborhoods.

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Sunshine
Units:Wikileaked
documents show that the NSA bugged meetings between various EU
ministers and their Japanese counterparts discussing secret trade
negotiations, meetings between our friend Frau
Merkel
and UN chief Ban Ki-Moon, as well as discussions between Netanyahu
and
Berlusconi, as
well as private meetings between Sarkozy,
Merkel and Berlusconi. Only
to fight terrorism, of course.

A
rebuttal: I
have owned several
puppies,
seen a number of
rainbows
and lived where single payer health
systems
worked just fine; deal
me in.

They're
Rich, Not Crazy:
Since at least last fall, the rich who had supported Romney in 2012
were
already donating
more to Hillary Clinton’s campaign than the combined
amount they had given to 11 of the original 17 Republican tools. This
suggests that the main
difference between Clinton and the Republican candidates is the
rhetoric that would
gain her the White House,
not the
reality of what she
would do once there.

Pick
& Chose:
Economist Timothy Taylor has mined the OMB's latest opus and presents
a marvelous list
of did-you-know's that'll let you
pick a couple of supporting facts for whatever it is of yours that
needs supporting, from inflation to life expectancy, infant mortality
to GDP growth and the increase in the number of Donald Trumps.

Pieces,
In Our Time:
The sale of arms to dictators, rebels and other scum contines to set
new records, up 14% over the last five years. The US corners most of
the market.

Tide,
Rolling In:
Scientists report that the global rate of sea level rise during the
last century was the fastest in 2700 years, and the rise continues to
accelerate. Except in
North Carolina and Oklahoma, where it is illegal, and Miami where it
might slow the building of beach frontcondos.Other scientists expect
that the continuing acidification (through CO2 absorption) of the
oceans will result in terminal deformities
in at least half of all juvenile corals in the near future. Go
snorkeling now.

Priorities:
LA County taxpayers spend over $233,000 a year for every kid kept in
lockup.

Infrastructure
Investment:
Ted Cruz says he will hire
and train enough storm troopersdevelop sufficient
personnel staffing and infrastructure – both fixed facilities and
the requisite transportation and logistics systems
– to locate, arrest, process and deport 12 million immigrants.
This, he says, will free up several million minimum wage service and
maintenance jobs for our indebted college graduates.

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

We
have become accustomed to the government executing people in our
name.

Guns
& Roses:
Economist James K. Galbraith has responded to the
CEA's hatchet job – and more importantly Paul Krugman's
uncritical acceptance of their questionable conclusions – of
Professor Friedman's analyses of Senator Sanders' economic program,
finding that “under conventional assumptions, the
projected impact of Senator Sanders' proposals stems from their scale
and ambition. When you
dare to do big things, big results should be expected.” It
seems that Clinton supporter Friedman is
a tad more rigorous than Clinton supporter Krugman, which is
probably more revealing than the analyses themselves. It all goes to
show how panic has spread throughout the DNC's networks.

Pre-existing
Conditions:
For Big Pharma, Big Healthcare and the healthcare insurance scammers,
the best off all possible worlds would be another Clinton White
House, this one facing a Republican Congress. She does not have much
of a want list and would be unable to enact what little nips and
tucks she thinks passable. So they would all keep getting richer and
contributing to her re-election campaign.

Quoted:
“I'll be so proud
when my daughter is president and runs a corrupt oligarchy,
just
like Hillary.”

Find
The Exit Nearest You:
If you live in Michigan, leave now. Don't pack, just go. The state
is home to two of the deadliest cities in the nation: Detroit,
easily the easiest city in the nation ; and Flint, which leads the
nation with the highest level of governmental depraved indifference
to the death and maiming of its children. In Michigan, especially if
you are black, you get to chose between the bullet or the constant
drip, drip, drip of avoidable poisons.

Parable:
When it comes to Britain's vote on leaving the European Union, the
EU seems to have put its one egg in its
one basket because they've only got the one egg and the one basket.
Without Great Britain there is no European Union.

Plausibility:
“In 2012, the
American people decided that Barack Obama should appoint justices to
the Supreme Court to fill any vacancies that occurred between January
of 2013 and January of 2017. Period. ” Seventeen
Supreme Court justices have been confirmed during election years.

Data
Point: The
latest Quinnipiac Poll (Feb 18) showed that among likely voters,
71% of the men and 64% of women find Clinton “not honest and
trustworthy.”

Imaginary
Friends: Why
do we – and our representatives in the major political parties –
pretend that the Supreme Court is supposed to be politically
impartial, but insist that our side gets to pick the justices? Why
don't we have impartial Presidents? Will the mythic wisdom of the
Constitution us?

Monday, February 22, 2016

Saturday, February 20, 2016

Think
how much economic activity providing all Americans safe drinking
water would generate.

Parity:The same government that let the Wall Street bankers award
themselves millions of dollars in bonuses while the banks were
sucking the Treasury's teat also created a law that lets pension
funds cut pensions 50% or more. Why underfunding pensions should
punish the workers and not the employers is a mystery lost in a sea
of lobbyist money.

As
Always:People
protesting the worst methane gas disaster in history have been
arrested. The people who let the leak go unrepaired for years have
been left to their ill-gotten gains. You'd think they were bankers or
some such.

Mr.
Rogers: It has
only taken Bernie Sanders 50 years to become an overnight sensation.

Clarification:Common Core standards
were developed by the
National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School
Officers, not the federal government. Their adoption by the states
has been voluntary, not mandated by the federal government. Hey,
listen up Kansas, I'm talking to you.

In
Like Flint:It's
not just Flint orHoosic
Fallsor
even a small handful of places,
lead and other poisonslurk
in
many of the nation's water supplies. Don't ask, even though what you
don't know may damage or kill your children.

Lump
Summed:As
the recovery continues, American
corporations have just
reported
the worst quarterly earnings since 2009.

Friday, February 19, 2016

“I
don’t think it stands to reason that it’s a good thing for the
University of Texas to admit as many blacks as possible.” Antonin
Scalia, RIP.

An
Apple A Day:
Continuing the assault on privacy, the head of the NSA makes the
unprovable claim that Apple's Tim Cook is right, Apple’s
fight with the FBI is bigger
than just one iPhone - it's
that encryption is
making it “much more difficult” for the agency to monitor
everything you do. To 'prove' their case the superspies claim they
could have prevented the Paris terror attack if only they had an even
bigger budget and all phones had 'back doors' so the
surveillance state
could monitor our every thought. Yes, we
should be afraid, of the terrorists but
perhaps more so of those who would save us from them..

Sum
Numbers: On
the Republican side, The Donald still polls way ahead of the pack,
while on the Democratic side the
Quinnipiac poll has Sanders beating the various GOP wannabes by 4
to 10 points. Hillary, not so much.

Hide
And Seek: Your
employer may know you are pregnant before you do, certainly soon
after you know. You got a problem with that? Does your employer?

Redundant:
Another group has just discovered that the TPP will put the coup de
grace to American manufacturing.

Goal?
Moscow is being plastered with posters proclaiming that 'Smoking
kills more people than Obama.'
Are they trying to get Russians to smoke less or Obama to kill more?

Lost
In Transition:
While the media pants after the Trump and Cruz show, off in a far
corner of our country, without anyone noticing, our fifth largest
state has slipped into bankruptcy. Illinois – which, granted,
isn't the least corrupt of the bunch – has $8 billion in unpaid and
pretty much unpayable debts. It's also got Chicago, but that's
another problem.

Keeping
Score: US
10-year Treasury bonds are selling at a discount that guarantees
negative returns. Who's buying, and why?

History
101: The
University of Texas now allows students to carry handguns in
classrooms. Sorry, but I can't forget that many years ago I lived
with someone who was in the plaza when Whitman began exercising his
right to kill a
bunch of people
bear arms.

Translation:
I
didn’t: "I
misspoke
er... didn't
think you'd catch me
er... thought
it was a hypothetical queston
er... made a mistake,”
James Clapper mistakenly
now says about lying to Congress.

The
Supremes:“The
justices of the Supreme Court have shaped a nation where children
toiled in coal mines, where Americans could be forced into camps
because of their race, and where a woman could be sterilized against
her will by state law. The Court was the midwife of Jim Crow, the
right hand of union busters, and the dead hand of the Confederacy.
Nor is the modern Court a vast improvement, with its incursions on
voting rights and its willingness to place elections for sale.”
Not to mention its
continuing crusade to treat women as chattel.

Nice
To Know: Rubio,
distinguishing himself from his fellow wannabes, says “I
wouldn't go as far as calling Clinton a 'traitor'.”

Keeping
Score: In
this, the Best of All Possible Countries, 51% of public school
students come from homes deep enough in poverty to qualify for free
or reduced-price lunches. Many of them get bags of canned goods to
take home so they can eat over the weekend. Yea, capitalism.

Mirrors:
Startup founder Justin
Keller, one of our
young elite, complains that “I
shouldn’t have to worry about being accosted. I shouldn’t have to
see the pain, struggle, and despair of homeless people to and from my
way to work every day.”

Protecting
The Self Serving:Tampa police are
refusing to provide
security and crowd control for a sold
out Beyoncé show because
they didn't like her Superbowl half-time program. Everybody's a
critic.

Thursday, February 18, 2016

We
invented democracy because human beings have a tendency to confuse
their own interests with the public’s. Steve
Randy Waldman

The
First Cut: A
court has sided with the government in insisting that Apple supply
the FBI with software to break encryption on a particular cell phone.
Apple, which originally said it could not be done, says that to do
so would open the door to similar intrusions on its customers privacy
by
authoritarian governments. Donald Trump, like
many others, insists that invading some people's privacy is
acceptable – as long as it's not his, which is pretty much Tim
Cook's point. Besides, doesn't the NSA have all the relevant
calls on file?

On
Point:
“A uterus
doesn’t qualify you to be president of the United States. You have
to have policies that’s reflective of social justice.'”

Back
To The Drawing Board:Goldman Sachs
economists are questioning
the efficacy of capitalismand
asking if corporate
profit margins can maintain their current
elevated levels.
What if our understanding of economics is wrong and corporate
capitalism is fatally flawed? At base capitalism is all about making
money (or rather, increasing the wealth of the capitalists at the
expense of everyone else) and is wholly indifferent to how this is
accomplished – producing goods, providing services or extracting
rents. Some
are beginning to suspect that Marx was right and that all capital
is taken from labor and not produced magically elsewhere in the
process.

The
War Lovers:Donald
Trump only gets partial credit for pointing out that Bush invaded
Iraq based on lies. While true, it only gets to the mechanism, not
the motivation. Yes, Bush's advsiors – neocons all – lied, but
they lied for a reason. They were true believers in an ideology that
demanded American , through an
unending series of military adventures, make the world safe for
America. That ideology behind
the Project
for the New American Centurystill
dominates the upper reaches of the GOP.

Evidence:
It turns out that the Oregon seditionists were, as we thought, full
of shit
Malheur.

Embryology:
The point missed by most of those who doubt Senator Sanders' chances
to win the fall election is that winning this time is not the
essential point. Yes, it would be nice. And yes, even if Bernie
wins he won't get most of what he and his supporters want. The
movement is the point. The occupy movement. The Black Lives Matter
movement. The takeaway is simply this: Another Sanders, younger,
perhaps of color, could one day soon win the Presidency at the head
of a movement strong enough to change the direction of the country.

Third
Time's Not A Charm:
On an annual basis, US Industrial production has fallen for a third
consecutive year. This has happened 19 times in the last 100 years,
and in 90% of those occasions an economic recession has followed.

Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Contractions:According to the Empire
State Manufacturing Survey, the contractions continue to be a month
apart, as it reports NY manufacturing business activity declined for
the seventh consecutive month.

Finger
On
The
Scale:
Donald Trump isn't
being paranoid when he accuses the RNC of stacking the debate
audience in favor of Jeb! - the establishment's choice. He'd best
expect it to continue, as Sanders undoubtedly does, as both the RNC
and DNC are preparing for brokered conventions. There also seem to be
well-financed mysterious operatives seeking personal data on
potential delegates, supposedly to 'influence' their decisions.

Fact:We have
already had an election to decide who gets to appoint the next
Supreme Court Justice. Obama won by over 5 million votes.

For
Whom The Bell Tolls:
The paltry handful of American
manufacturing jobs that have survived NAFTA, China's inclusion in the
WTO and various bilateral trade agreements are unlikely to long
survive the TPP – American workers simply can't compete with the
$1.70 an hour paid in Mexico and even lower wages in the other TPP
conspirators.

Private/Public
Cooperation:
The federal government now uses private debt collection agencies to
pursue student loan dead-beats. These agencies seek judgments in
federal court ordering the debtor to pay and
then turn to the US
Marshal's service to serve warrants
and arrest the debtors. So the government pays an middleman to use
the federal government's resources to recoup money owed – through
what is essentially a system of debtors' prisons.

Paul/Peter:RepublicanMary
Lou Bruner, running for
a seat on the Texas Board of Education, claims that “Obama has a
soft spot for homosexuals because of the years he spent as a male
prostitute in his twenties.” This undoubtedly tells
you more about the Texas Sate Board of Education than it does
about Mr. Obama.

The
Profilers: Ted
Cruz's campaign has a clever mobile app – called 'Cruz Crew' –
that is designed to gather personal information
from users’ phones,
tracking their
movements and stealing all the names and contact information on the
infected phones. Nor is the Cruz campaign the only one doing this.

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Clarification: It turns out that
Article 2, Section 2, Clause 2 says that the president shall nominate
justices to the Supreme Court unless
the president is a Democrat in the fourth year of his elected term.
It is too bad that Justice Scalia's actuarial event did not occur at
a time more convenient to the Republicans – it is awkward for
them to try to prevent the
clear wording of the constitution from being followed in
replacing a firm proponent of “original intent”.

Lessons
Learned: Eight
years into the Great Dismal Swamp a few things have become clear, the
most important being that the world's central banks – specifically
the Fed – have failed to drag us out of the doldrums. After
bailing out the big banks with trillions, wasting a few hundred
million on a puny pretense at putting people back to work, flinging
money at the problem with QE I, II, and III, (globally this comes to
$12.3 trillion) and then pretending things were turning up well
enough to engineer an ill-timed interest rate hike... all this and
now we're being prepped for negative
interest rates, which are really, really uncharted territory.
No
one really knows what is going on. “No one knows what the Fed
is really trying to accomplish, or what it can accomplish, or how to
go about accomplishing it.”

The
Skinny:Oprah
bought a big chunk of Weight Watchers not because it works, but
because it doesn't.
But she knows from long personal experience that permanent lifelong
weigh loss is simply not achievable, but the desire to do so is
everlasting – as
are the profits to be made from the needy.

Feedom
Of Choice: The
British government has decreed that deciding who you want to buy
things from is not a basic right, especially if you boycott arms
makers, fossil fuels, tobacco producers or illegal Israeli
settlements.

Ultimate
RICO:
US families whose relatives have been killed by Mexican drug cartels
have brought suit against HSBC on the basis that it knowingly
participated in and profited from the criminal activities of the
cartels – and use as evidence the bank's admission that it
laundered over $800 million for the cartels, an act for which
it paid nearly $2 billion in penalties.

Monday, February 15, 2016

Good
Riddance: With
the death of Antonin Scalia, the GOP has finally abandoned the
constitution of these United States. No longer shall we hear of
'original intent' or 'literal interpretation', for they have
discovered that their
new and improved version of the
Constitution limits a president's term of authority and
responsibility to
three years, after which he bakes cookies and sits on the front
porch for eleven months, leaving everything that comes up to his yet
to be nominated, much less elected, successor. [Note that eleven
months is not “a few”, Senator Rubio. That is 25% of a
presidential term.]

Should
the American people have
a say in who gets nominated? Yes. And they did. They elected a
president to do those sorts of things. It was a guy named Obama and
in 2012 5 million more Americans chose him than chose the other guy.
Filibuster
all they wish, the Republicans will only be damaging their rather
shopworn credibility even further as obstructionists, sore losers and
poorly behaved, uncivil miscreants.

How
serious and reasoned they are, promising to reject anyone the
President nominates – no hearings needed. As Mitch McConnell sees
it, his “number
one job” is to defeat Barack Obama, no matter how much damage
is done to the country. No process. No pretense of serious
deliberation. No playacting of democratic governance. Attack and
posture. This is the same Mitch McConnell who in
2005 correctly pointed out that “the
President, and the President alone, nominates judges.” Let
the games begin.

-/-/-/-/-/-/-

Loyalty
Oath: Hillary
Clinton's version of the Democratic party includes having to sign a
pledge to be a loyal supporter of Barak Obama, except when she
doesn't.

Economic
Theory: The
heart of the capitalist system is based on setting aside some of your
income and investing it in ways that will return some measure of
profit. Then combining the profit with the capital and doing it
again – known as compound interest. You cannot do that in a
negative interest environment. Negative interest is a ploy by
central banks to get you to consume everything you have, seed corn
and all. What it leads to -
aside from a war on cash as central banks try to control all your
money all the time - this effort to quash the accumulation of
capital, this punishing of saving and investment, is something new,
as yet unnamed; it
isn't capitalism.

On
Duplicity and Gullibilty:
Ms Clinton would have us
believe that the powerful men who
run Wall Street are just ordinary guys who give her millions
of dollars and expect nothing in
return but that she seek a fair and just society, even if this
discomfort them.

Because
They Can: The
UK's highest court overseeing the spies at GCHQ have ruled that it is
completely legal for the government to hack phones and computers and
to remotely activate the microphones and cameras in such devices. No
warrants. No suspicion. No privacy. And not just in Merrie Olde,
but anywhere in the world. The NSA undoubtedly has a similar
blessing.

Shoe,
Fitting:
Perhaps there should be a
special place in... heaven?.. for a politician who accepts
$133,000 from private prison operators while telling Blacks and
Latinos that she wants to end private for-profit prisons.

Our Motto

Keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.